[Photo provided to China Daily]

Lorenzo di Bonaventura, the Hollywood producer behind all the five Transformers movies, says the key to making the franchise appealing is "to be true to the original and at the same time make it relevant for today".

He says that building personalities for characters, such as making Optimus Prime like a "grandfather" and Bumblebee a "teenager", resonate with modern audiences.

Speaking about the lack of Chinese elements in the movie despite their presence in the last one, he says: "We don't look at it as a reduction. We're telling the story in a different place. How can you tell a Chinese story in England? It would be hard. It's really about where we decided to tell the story," says Di Bonaventura.

"I hope some time in the future we can find a way to tell a story that has a lot of interesting Chinese characters."

Speaking about the combination of King Arthur's myth and the Transformers story, he says: "We realized that there are very strong similarities between the two. Honor, loyalty, trust and brotherhood. They exist in both stories. So we put them together."

Jiang Yong, a Beijing-based industry analyst, says the Transformers films resonate with Chinese born in the 1970s and 1980s, as the American animated series The Transformers was a hit when it was introduced to China in 1988.

"Transformers 5 will be one of the biggest movies of the summer. It may break the box-office record of the eighth Fast & Furious film in China," says Jiang.

Universal's blockbuster The Fate of the Furious earned 2.67 billion yuan in China, the highest grossing import in history.

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